Sunday, June 14, 2015

Every 18 months or so, Rab Terry and Jennifer Fariss, the owners of the Studio Gallery in San Francisco kindly offer me a forum to exhibit work that I've compiled. As I work full time, it takes me awhile to accumulate enough pieces that are 'gallery worthy'. I primarily work plein air, but the impetus of a show like this encourages me to generate some studio pieces as well. This show is a good representation of my regular painting 'haunts': the routes I take to and from work in the east bay, some coastal pieces from my Pt. Reyes workshops, and work from my annual Sierra painting pack trip, plus the summer workshop I teach up at the Sierra Buttes.

The show went up a few days ago, and this afternoon is the reception. I'll be heading over soon. I'll also be giving a talk at the gallery, this Thursday, the 18th of June from 7-8.

Part of the studio wall where candidate pieces for the show wait before being selected, signed and trimmed.

Some framed pieces line the crit rail, and a few other 'hopefuls' are pinned above.

The nerve wracking part of this process, after cleaning up all my edges, signing and photographing them, is to trim each piece within about 1/8th of an inch of its border, to fit it to the acid free foam core backing it will be hinge mounted to.

Here's a few pieces from the show:

Tomales Bay

This was painted on site at the Marconi Conference Center during the CAC winter retreat. It benefitted from hanging all spring in the studio, where I had time to ponder how to clean up and organize the sky a little more. I've been studying skies and clouds at work as an ongoing project, so used some of my thinking from that exercise to explore temperature shifts as a way to separate very close values between the cloud and the sky.

Headwaters

Painted up at the Sierra Buttes last summer, during my workshop. This is Love's Falls on the north fork of the Yuba River, which I've painted aspects of many times. I tried doing a large studio version of this, but it did not have vitality of the original plein air piece, so this one is in the show, and the studio version did not make the cut.

The Edge of Moonlight

Here's a studio piece that did make it. Last summer's pack trip was up into the Sabrina Basin, to Drunken Sailor Lake. We were camped on almost solid granite, and there were a few other lakes within walking distance, including Moonlight Lake, which had a beautiful emerald/turqouise color to the water from glacial silt. This type of subject is a favorite one of mine because it combines aspects of water, plus a celebration of reflected light in shadow, which on pale granite manifests itself in subtle temperature shifts that vary from the angles of the rock.

That's it for now. I gotta run to the opening. Hope to see a few of you there.